In addition to its functionality for RNA structural analysis, the DSSR program also introduces novel cartoon-block schematic representations of nucleic acid structures to be rendered with PyMOL. Illustrated below are four sample images with the script and all data files (cartoon-block.tar.gz).

Following the above instructions, one should be able to reproduce the four sample images without a problem. Similar procedures can be easily applied to any other nucleic acid structures. Hopefully, this schematic visualization feature provides yet another reason for you to give DSSR a try.

Thomas Holder, the Principal Developer of PyMOL, has written a PyMOL plugin that implements the dssr_block command. Now users can create "block" shaped cartoons for nucleic acid bases and base pairs interactively in PyMOL.

Note added on 2016-04-01: DSSR now also has two new related options, --cartoon-block and --block-color, to make the generation of schematic cartoon block images more straightforward, and flexible.

Created and maintained by Dr. Xiang-Jun Lu [律祥俊], Principal Investigator of the NIH grant R01GM096889Dr. Lu is currently affiliated with the Bussemaker Laboratory at the Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University.